An Experimental Study On The English Orthographic Awareness In EFL Learning For Chinese Students

Word recognition plays an important role in English lexical learning. As far as the writing systems are concerned, English words are alphabetic, and Chinese characters are logographic. This thesis aims at exploring how the orthographic awareness influences the English learning for the Chinese students from the viewpoint of psychology. The notion of orthography and the salient features of English words and Chinese characters are first introduced to provide teachers, learners and researchers alike with a general idea about these two writing systems. The previous researches are also reviewed. At the same time the significance of the present study is put forward, paving a path for the experiments in Chapter Three. Some representative models of lexical access are reviewed in this thesis, among which Forster's search model and Morton's logogen model are highlighted. Forster's search model is a type of two-stage processing model, where the first stage is completed before the second stage begins: as such, it is serial in its mode of operation. The first stage is the one in which the search is carried on: this search is ordered by frequency of the lexical items in the language, beginning with the most frequent items, then successively down through the listing until the lowest-frequency items are reached. Forster likens this stage to opening the right page of a dictionary, but finding the items on that page listed in order of frequency, with high-frequency items at the top, and starting the search from the top of the page down. By contrast, the logogen model is a direct one, in the sense that each element in the input signal contributed to part of the access process itself: this process is seen as cumulative, each phoneme in the input effecting one further step in the overall process, up to the point at which no further input is available, or is needed to identify the stored form. In a sense, this can be regarded as a type of word-detector model, since each phoneme in the input represents further evidence of the presence of a particular word, which, once the evidence has accumulated sufficiently, can be detected. But its operation is really on two levels: initially, it acts as a phoneme detector, and builds, or traces, a phoneme sequence, until the point at which a word matching that sequence is encountered. The essence of such a theory is that for each word there is a separate detector which is selectively tuned to the perceptual features characteristic of that word. Based on these models, three experiments are conducted in Chapter Three. In Experiment 1, a total of 150 items were devised, among which 25 items were words, 50 items were pseudowords and 75 items were nonwords. 75 pairs of three groups were constructed, the members of each pair were as similar as possible in length. Subjects are asked to choose the words or the pseudowords in each pair. In Experiment 2, the original lexical decision task papers and their representative English test papers were collected. For an individual, only the performance of lexical decision task in the nonwords with greater degree of deviation or that in the nonwords with less degree of deviation cannot interpret the overall recognition of the nonwords. Therefore, the mean score of the two parts was computed. Then the correlation between the mean score of the nonwords under different conditions and the mid-term English performance was computed. In Experiment 3, twelve sets of six CVC words, each four letters long, were prepared. Each set contained a clue word, a beginning-same target word, a vowel-same target word, an end-same target word, a phonologically primed word (rhyming with the clue word but with a different rime spelling), and a control word with no letters in common with the clue word. This research investigates whether the beginning Chinese readers can exploit information from the orthographic rime of clue words to help them to decode unfamiliar words. The experimental results show: a) in Experiment 1, the English orthographic awareness for the native Chinese develops gradually with grade; b) in Experiment 2, the correlation between the English performance and the lexical decision task performance is significant; and c) in Experiment 3, first-grade children were equally able to use orthographic information from the beginning, middle, and end of clue words to identify unfamiliar target words. Moreover, the improvement in reading end-(or orthographic rime-) same target words following clue word presentation reflected phonological priming. In second-grade children, with correction for retesting effects,...